A Small Circus

16mo, br. ed. pp.612. This is a translation of the 1931 book Bauern Bonzen und Bomben by Rudolf Ditzen, who wrote under the pseudonym of Hans Fallada. He uses a small fictional town called Altholm as his vehicle. It starts off with a small circus coming to town but refusing to take out an advert in the town's least successful and very provincial local paper `The Chronicle'. So the editor writes a piece about the circus saying how rubbish the first performance was, despite not actually being there. That sets the scenes for the childish Machiavellian antics that run through this book. We then have cows being confiscated by tax collectors to be auctioned in lieu of payment; the farmers refuse to bid at the subsequent auction and then block the tax inspectors exit, leading to a hullabaloo. Things soon spiral out of control when the farmers stage a march through the town to air their grievances. The police behave like absolute thugs and the local politicians keep playing double deals to try to please all of the people all of the time. We see how the townies react to the farmers and the way the papers twist everything whilst absolutely everyone is stabbing each other in the back. All the while the influence of national politics looms over everyone in the shape of the `Jewish Republic' as the Weimar Republic is referred to in this work.